In the Fire of Stillness

Wild, unsettled and dangerous, the land had yet to be viewed by any but the most intrepid travelers from the east.  Most of the news from there was legend:  Stories too fantastic to be believed, but too terrifying to be ignored.  The vast Louisiana Purchase had been set to paper only forty-two years prior, essentially doubling the size of the United States at the time, and had yet to be crossed by even the resolute and starry-eyed gold miners of 1849.  

The area we know as the Desert Southwest was still under the control of Mexico.  To the north, the Oregon Territory had the deserved reputation of a lawless frontier.  Unsurprising, given the territory was owned by both the United States and England, but neither had yet taken any steps to govern it.   

These would've been facts known by the two hundred and thirty eight men, women and children - Mormons - who had gathered in New York in the winter of 1845, hoping to follow what they believed to be their directive West.  They were facts which held the realization that the group profoundly lacked the defenses, money and transportation necessary for making a journey across the forbidding expanse.  

Instead, they chose a route hard to imagine in both length and difficulty - rarely sailed today - a benefit of the Panama Canal:  Boarding a ship in the coastal Northeast, they set sail on a course which would take them south along the eastern States, south still along the edge of South America, around Cape Horn at the southern tip of the continent, and back up the western shores, to what is now California. 

In the midst of the trip, they crossed the Doldrums:  An area of high pressure along the equator - characterized by little or no wind - brought about by the collision of the prevailing winds of the northern hemisphere, as they blow against those of the southern hemisphere.   So worrisome was the prospect to ship's captains, of being mired, unmoving in the sweltering heat of this area, it became known as the "horse latitudes";  a name arising from the practice undertaken by desperate crews, having been stalled for weeks on end, of forcing their horses overboard to conserve water.

The passengers of the Brooklyn show no record of resorting to such measures, but at least four of them died as they were stranded in "muggy, oppressive heat, motionless on a sea like molten glass".  There was little shade on the ship.  The area below decks would've been sweltering with a lack of ventilation, and bodies "so closely crowded that the heat of the Tropics was terrible". 

Though they ultimately succeeded in fighting on to their destination - with further sickness, hardship and loss-of-life - it's unlikely any of the ship's inhabitants ever forgot the stillness, the fear - the agonizing loss of hope - that would've overtaken them on those days upon the middle parallel, as they sat paralyzed in the stagnant winds, stripped of the likelihood they would live to see the shore. 

There is a painful similarity with the windless equatorial sea, to much of life.  So much, in fact, that we now know the term 'Doldrums' mainly as an emotion:  A period of stagnation, depression, melancholy, gloom.   And despite our ability today, unprecedented in history, to move freely, to entertain ourselves constantly, to surround ourselves with an artificial wind, we experience those things on a record level.  Our everyday lives - repeating the same tasks, seeing the same people, driving the same roads, solving the same problems - all give us the feeling of being stuck;  fastened onto a rail that leads somewhere beyond our control, regardless of our attempts to slow or stop or swerve.

While it is absolutely necessary for us to strive to live beyond the ordinary, keeping ahead of us our goals, we need not worry that we don't live atop the mountain.  That not every moment - maybe not even a single one, lately, is of encouragement and inspiration and song.  We need not fear the everyday.  

To be inspired. we must spend time in the silence of discouragement.  Before experiencing joy, we need to recognize the jagged cut of pain.  To be together, we must first know the cold, hollow confines of being alone.  And the path to strength and understanding is necessarily lined with confusion and helplessness.

It is of course one of our strongest desires, to be free of pain and sadness and loneliness.  It is the instinct of survival, and our unrecognized nature of hope, to use any means at our disposal to avoid the windless doldrums of the ordinary.  And the power of these things over us, is the fact that they come to us unbidden.  We never ask to feel uninspired and exhausted.  We don't pine for a great sadness to come over our days and devour the light.  Those who have lived beneath it, would not wish upon their most mortal of enemies the darkness of depression.  And yet, unavoidably, these appear.

And they will never be enjoyable.  They are not meant to be.  There is nothing from which we can gain any real joy, that doesn't first require patience.  That doesn't exact sacrifice.  That doesn't teach us, through a thousand failures, what it means to love, even among people and situations which might appear, at first glance, as being unworthy of such.

But there is a reason for walking before we run.  For sleeping, before we finally wake.  For pressing on, even though the wind has left our sails, and the shoreline has vanished.  The trials are necessarily painful, as would be expected of fire touching a human soul;  leaving the ashes of impurities and chaff in its wake.

But after the fire, comes the new growth.  And the rain.  And then the tree, that grows strong and true, unhindered, directly toward the sun.